I haven't done one of these for ages. Don't expect too much from this one.
I ended up making summer holiday plans much later than usual thanks to some f**kery with work which meant that my new contract was much later in coming than usual, so I didn’t want to commit to anything in terms of travel. By the time that was sorted, I really couldn’t be arsed sorting much out, so just decided to spend a couple of weeks in France since I’d seen pretty much nothing of the country apart from Paris and Strasbourg up until that point. I didn’t go to any major parks – ok, I guess one of them was – and I didn’t end up starting in France at all thanks to stumbling upon a 20 quid (plus £4,353 in extra charges since I had the audacity to check in some luggage and request a seat) flight to Luxembourg. Never been, heard nothing about it, but it’s a new country cred, so why not?
Luxembourg
I think I got to the hotel at around 6pm and wasn’t massively enamoured at first since the immediate area around there - near the train station for convenience – wasn’t particularly nice and felt slightly sketchy, but a walk across one of the bridges for a quick look around the city centre changed my mind fairly quickly.
I’d decided to head to Walygator as a day trip the next day since there are a couple of direct trains a day in each direction and Monster (B&M invert) has been a bit of a vendetta for me for ages. I’d been to Expoland in Osaka, but Orochi was down for maintenance, it started raining soon after I arrived anyway, so I only managed a couple of other coasters, and then the stand-up derailed less than two weeks later, closing down the whole park permanently.
Walygator Grand Est
Annoyingly, there was major work happening on the train lines (going on for a few months), so any trains heading south of the city had replacement buses to another station further down the line. This was actually fine. They were running it extremely well, with buses leaving at roughly ten-minute intervals and not being busy, but taking a fair bit longer than the train would’ve done. Since I didn’t know how long that bus would take and had no idea about traffic etc., I ended up getting to that other train station stupidly early, around an hour before the train was due.
And then, 5-minutes before it was due, it was cancelled. There wasn’t another one for 3 hours. Had those trains been running from Luxembourg, I’d have gone and done some sightseeing for a bit and tried again, but the extra time and faff with the shuttle buses meant that I just sacked it off and went back to Luxembourg. I was also leaving the next day, so Orochi/Monster continues to be my biggest current coaster vendetta.
More Luxembourg
I was back in the city by around half ten, so just had a full sightseeing day rather than the few hours I’d have had otherwise. It was lovely to be fair. I can’t be arsed to explain what anything is, but here are way too many pictures:
Actual France will start in the next bit.
I ended up making summer holiday plans much later than usual thanks to some f**kery with work which meant that my new contract was much later in coming than usual, so I didn’t want to commit to anything in terms of travel. By the time that was sorted, I really couldn’t be arsed sorting much out, so just decided to spend a couple of weeks in France since I’d seen pretty much nothing of the country apart from Paris and Strasbourg up until that point. I didn’t go to any major parks – ok, I guess one of them was – and I didn’t end up starting in France at all thanks to stumbling upon a 20 quid (plus £4,353 in extra charges since I had the audacity to check in some luggage and request a seat) flight to Luxembourg. Never been, heard nothing about it, but it’s a new country cred, so why not?
Luxembourg
I think I got to the hotel at around 6pm and wasn’t massively enamoured at first since the immediate area around there - near the train station for convenience – wasn’t particularly nice and felt slightly sketchy, but a walk across one of the bridges for a quick look around the city centre changed my mind fairly quickly.
I’d decided to head to Walygator as a day trip the next day since there are a couple of direct trains a day in each direction and Monster (B&M invert) has been a bit of a vendetta for me for ages. I’d been to Expoland in Osaka, but Orochi was down for maintenance, it started raining soon after I arrived anyway, so I only managed a couple of other coasters, and then the stand-up derailed less than two weeks later, closing down the whole park permanently.
Walygator Grand Est
Annoyingly, there was major work happening on the train lines (going on for a few months), so any trains heading south of the city had replacement buses to another station further down the line. This was actually fine. They were running it extremely well, with buses leaving at roughly ten-minute intervals and not being busy, but taking a fair bit longer than the train would’ve done. Since I didn’t know how long that bus would take and had no idea about traffic etc., I ended up getting to that other train station stupidly early, around an hour before the train was due.
And then, 5-minutes before it was due, it was cancelled. There wasn’t another one for 3 hours. Had those trains been running from Luxembourg, I’d have gone and done some sightseeing for a bit and tried again, but the extra time and faff with the shuttle buses meant that I just sacked it off and went back to Luxembourg. I was also leaving the next day, so Orochi/Monster continues to be my biggest current coaster vendetta.
More Luxembourg
I was back in the city by around half ten, so just had a full sightseeing day rather than the few hours I’d have had otherwise. It was lovely to be fair. I can’t be arsed to explain what anything is, but here are way too many pictures:
Actual France will start in the next bit.
